Content management and production processes in the media industry are becoming more complex, time-critical and integrated. In a bit world this puts new demands on management and creates new possibilities of intersystem integration. The necessary IT infrastructure is available today, but the mechanisms for interchange of management information are not standardized. This paper presents the new XML-based IFRAtrack recommendation, a tracking information inter- change mechanism for integrating production management systems in the media industry. IFRAtrack was developed jointly by representatives of newspapers, system manufacturers and research organi- zations.

The complexity of producing a newspaper is well documented. This process has a very tight schedule involving thousands of elements linked together in a chain of activities. Attempts to supervise this process have been successful using the IFRAtrack recommendation designed for tracking activities in a newspaper environment. In this paper we extend the IFRAtrack model to the production of television news, a process which is basically very similar to newspaper production. This is a first step towards extending production tracking with IFRAtrack to general media production, such as web publications, commercial printing and radio production.

The newspapers in the Nordic countries offer their readers a home delivered newspaper, often before 6 a.m. This helps the newspaper stay competitive as an information channel. But the distribution service is one of the most cost demanding processes of the newspaper companies, which is one important purpose for the distribution to be improved.In this study metropolitan newspaper home distribution have been analyzed. Based on three case studies, involving Swedish morning newspapers with a circulation from 25 000 to approximately 400 000, the bottlenecks of the newspaper distribution have been identified. Areas of possible improvement have been found and a preliminary analysis of the cost efficiency and other benefits of one particular solution, involving a new drop-off structure has been made.In the present study an object model of the newspaper home distribution has been developed, which is an extension of the existing IFRAtrack production model. We have reasons to believe that IT-solutions based on a structured model can be used to achieve a better productivity within the newspaper distribution process.

Workflow management and decision support in a digitalenvironment – an IFRAtrack--based prototype in real production

Newspaper production is a complex and often suboptimised process, characterised by heterogeneous computer based production tools in a distributed environment. Attempts to optimize this process have generally been on a local subsystem level, without a global perspective. With the emerging IFRAtrack standard for exchanging local and global tracking information, new possibilities for global optimization are emerging. This paper presents the Intranet client-server solution we have chosen as the platform for a global production management system (GPMS) aimed at solving these problems. A production database contains the relevant information supplied by the local systems and acts as a global collector of production information. A web server communicates with the database through scripts and other mechanisms to dynamically retrieve and update its contents. Users interact with the system using WWW browsers, which provide the basis for the client user interface. Distributed code modules, applets, can provide functionality not supported by HTML.

Production processes in the graphic arts industry, especially in newspapers, differ from other industrial manufacturing processes in many critical aspects. Enterprise-wide production management requires new methods and system solutions.This paper presents a general model for global production management systems in the graphic arts industry. The model covers product structuring, standardization of intersystem communication, production tracking and scheduling, and resource allocation. Experiences from a prototype installation are reported.The possibilities of future extensions to the model is discussed. Industry restructuring will require the management of networked virtual enterprise production processes. Increased information repurposing will require the management of parallel production of printed and digital products. The model can also be enhanced through the incorporation of additional product information, e.g., for color and quality management purposes. We show, that our model can be developed to include these features.

The paper presents and discusses the use of a software simulation tool for testing and validating a production decision support system. The developed simulator is specially designed for simulation of the entire newspaper production process. The authors propose methods for testing and validating a global production management system (GPMS), before implementing it in the production environment. Newspaper production is a complex time-critical process characterized by heterogeneous computer based production tools in a distributed environment. A GPMS is an application of decision support systems for the entire newspaper production process, and needs to collect events from various production subsystems to get the current production state. In order to test a GPMS without disturbing the daily production, there is a need for a simulation tool which must simulate the event providers. This can only be achieved by using a strictly specified communication mechanism between the event providers and the GPMS

This paper presents and discusses general simulation models and global simulation systems for newspaper production, an extreme case of concurrent engineering where the final product is defined very late in the manufacturing process.Based on earlier work on production tracking and control models we have developed simulation models for newspaper production decision support. The aim of simulation is to generate adequate decision support data for the efficient control and management of the entire production process-from the editorial offices to the distribution. The focus has been on product modelling and on the simulation of processes and resources. The simulation models will also be included in a global production management system (GPMS) for the newspaper production process.

XML-based IFRA¬track: the glue for integration in business-wide media workflow management systems